open source marketer and community manager

Month: August 2014

I’m cruising Silicon Valley these days asking “how does your company do OpenStack?” to collect best practices and notable mistakes from various leaders of OpenStack corporate community. I’m hoping to build a ‘how to’ manual to help managers build better dev teams, more effective at collaborating while shipping products to their customers. This is an effort that goes hand-in-hand with training new developers with Upstream Training and other initiatives aimed at sustaining OpenStack growth.

I often have to explain to managers of OpenStack corporate members how and why to contribute to the project. The level of complexity reached has now exceeded the simple answers, like ‘fix simple bugs’ or ‘read the wiki pages’. For example, the participants to the Upstream Training in Atlanta had difficulties finding low-hanging-fruit bugs to work on: by the time they were ready to commit, someone else had already fixed it. Too much is going on at the same time, newcomers are confused at many different levels.

While we will keep training developers through Upstream Training (and other initiatives), we’re going to start talking to managers too. I’d like to know how development teams are organized, how they balance shipping products to customers with contributing upstream, what incentives are in place that help or prevent contributions to go upstream, how career paths are influenced by contributions to the open source collaboration, etc.